The Very Definition of Folly: Saving the Earth from Environmentalists

Global heating is the greatest challenge of our time. While we know what is causing the global heating problem, and we know how to fix it, certain environmentalists pose a severe threat to the great hope of renewable energy that must be part of the solution to global heating. All across the United States those claiming to speak for the environment are filing legal actions against developers of solar and wind projects. They are using environmental laws, zoning laws, and anything else they can latch onto to fight renewable energy projects. This is the very definition of folly. We environmental lawyers have perfected the art of slowing down, burdening, and questioning to death developers. It was a great strategy for fighting the bad guys. But it is now presenting one of the biggest threats to the good guys, and to our environment. We now need to learn how to say “yes.

Behind The Curve: The National Media\u27s Reporting on Global Warming

In July 2004, eight States, the City of New York and three land trusts filed suit against five electric power corporations for contributing to global warming. The complaints allege that the defendants are the largest global warming polluters in the United States. The plaintiffs seek an injunction under the federal common law of public nuisance, or in the alternative, under state nuisance law, to require the power companies to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide. Press coverage of the plaintiffs’ global warming case so far has been mixed. The press has generally failed to understand several of the important legal principles involved, including the legal doctrine of public nuisance. The legal case takes place against a backdrop of a long campaign of distortion by industry relating to the science of global warming that has affected the reporting on global warming generally. Historically, the press has unwittingly distorted coverage of global warming science by uncritically accepting the industry view that the science is in dispute

EXPLORING ANTICORRELATIONS AND LIGHT ELEMENT VARIATIONS IN NORTHERN GLOBULAR CLUSTERS OBSERVED BY THE APOGEE SURVEY

We investigate the light-element behavior of red giant stars in northern globular clusters (GCs) observed by the SDSS-III Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment. We derive abundances of 9 elements (Fe, C, N, O, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, and Ti) for 428 red giant stars in 10 GCs. The intrinsic abundance range relative to measurement errors is examined, and the well-known C–N and Mg–Al anticorrelations are explored using an extreme-deconvolution code for the first time in a consistent way. We find that Mg and Al drive the population membership in most clusters, except in M107 and M71, the two most metal-rich clusters in our study, where the grouping is most sensitive to N. We also find a diversity in the abundance distributions, with some clusters exhibiting clear abundance bimodalities (for example M3 and M53) while others show extended distributions. The spread of Al abundances increases significantly as cluster average metallicity decreases as previously found by other works, which we take as evidence that low metallicity, intermediate mass AGB polluters were more common in the more metal-poor clusters. The statistically significant correlation of [Al/Fe] with [Si/Fe] in M15 suggests that 28Si leakage has occurred in this cluster. We also present C, N, and O abundances for stars cooler than 4500 K and examine the behavior of A(C+N+O) in each cluster as a function of temperature and [Al/Fe]. The scatter of A(C+N +O) is close to its estimated uncertainty in all clusters and independent of stellar temperature. A(C+N+O) exhibits small correlations and anticorrelations with [Al/Fe] in M3 and M13, but we cannot be certain about these relations given the size of our abundance uncertainties. Star-to-star variations of a-element (Si, Ca, Ti) abundances are comparable to our estimated errors in all clusters